Happy birthday, iTunes Music Store. Well, almost: the store was launched on 28 April 2003 with a catalogue of 200k tracks, and went on to sell 1m downloads in its first week. We all know how the story continued. Now Apple is celebrating its music store’s 10th birthday with a timeline within iTunes itself: A Decade of iTunes. It outlines “key moments in our history” on a year-by-year basis, along with charts of the top-selling songs and albums from each year. The celebrations come at an important time for iTunes, though, as Apple continues its licensing negotiations for a streaming personal-radio offshoot. iTunes’ a la carte business is still going strong – as it passed 25bn songs sold in early February, Apple said the store is now averaging 15k song downloads every minute – but the company’s challenge now is to manage the transition towards a streaming/access-based iTunes, whether that sits alongside download sales or (ultimately) replaces them.
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…